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Talk:S.M. Stirling
Do you think we could get a few articles on Stirling's work here? Or do we want to go down that path? TR 05:54, 7 April 2007 (UTC) That sounds like borrowing trouble. Besides, all I've ever read of his is The Sky People. What's with this article, anyway? I get that it's bitten off Wikipedia, but is it really fair to start the thing right the fuck off with Critisisms, in lieu of biography? Turtle Fan 19:58, 7 April 2007 (UTC) ItCotCK is just a few weeks away! This is one ugly fucker, ain't he. Turtle Fan 13:37, 3 March 2008 (UTC) :He's even funnier looking without the long hair. :I finally read TSP--pretty fun all-in-all. TR 00:20, 4 March 2008 (UTC) ::The plot moves along by fits and starts and then hangs off a cliff just when it begins to intrigue (something ItCotCK will remedy, so it seems). But the charm of the book is that its setting is that of a sci-fi golden era throwback, without having to wade through the outmoded syntax, literary conventions, and plot devices that make reading classic pulp a bit of a chore. I doubt I would have noticed if there hadn't been a plot at all. Turtle Fan 13:43, 4 March 2008 (UTC) So I finished ItCotCK tonight. It was great setting-wise, but it raised far, far more questions than it answered (come to think of it it didn't really answer much of anything in TSP.) More emphasis on the Lords, though, which has me much more intrigued as to their nature. However, it opened us up to an even more appealing pulpish setting, one where real progress might be made in the pursuit of the identity of the duology's elusive eponyms, and though I hate to sound Gizzi-ish, demanding sequels in the face of a complete and utter lack of Evidence to the plans therefor, I have to say--he left it pretty fucking wide open. Turtle Fan 14:10, 5 April 2008 (UTC) :I started reading it this week. So far, so good. TR 15:13, 5 April 2008 (UTC) ::Spoiler alert: ::I enjoyed it. I enjoyed TSP more, though. I guess I find Venus a more captivating setting. Maybe it's partly because, on Venus, the love interest is a gorgeous young woman who goes around the nearest thing to bare-ass, while on Mars it's an inhuman who bears a passing resemblance to a woman in the sense that a stretched-out penny bears a resemblance to a real one, heavily swaddled and speaking like a none-too-good electronic dictionary. I won't deny sex has a bit to do with my enjoyment of reading material. More important is the ending: TSP's told us something, and left some hanging, appropriate for Part 1; ItCotCK, supposed to be the finale, told us much left and opened the question-box to much more. ::I also picked up on a fair share of John Carter cribs, and probably missed many more. I never read ERB's Venus series, but I'm going to start that now and see if I can recognize ex post facto anything that wound its way into TSP. These books revive my interest in the pulpsters, and I'm sorry to see them go; I know there's always plenty of old pulp to read, but fiction from a different era tends to feel not quite right, you know what I mean? Turtle Fan 06:40, 6 April 2008 (UTC) There is a Stirling Wiki Just in case anyone is interested. http://www.smstirlingwiki.org/w/Main_Page I was thinking we might see about somehow officially linking to them, if they are interested (and if we are as well). TR 20:48, 13 April 2008 (UTC) IatD Evacuating a city and bombing it . . . well, it's certainly never been done for real, but it's a pretty obvious avenue for an author writing about a nuclear-capable conqueror who's lost patience with a puckish localized rebellion. I'd want something a little more definitive before I called that a Stirling homage--maybe something like FDR mentioning space lizards to Turtletaub. Putting the two of them together makes it quite clear what Birmingham was thinking. Turtle Fan 18:53, April 26, 2010 (UTC) More Lords of Creation! George RR Martin has put together an anthology of short stories by many modern SF writers doing what Stirling did years ago, writing homages to Burroughs and his ilk. All are short stories, about 30 pages for the most part. The book is called Old Mars. Martin's introductory essay is charming, though it did more to pique my interest in the classic works which inspired the stories he's presented than in those stories themselves. One which I did read right away was Stirling's contribution. It's set on the same Mars as ItCotCK, two years before that novel's adventure takes place. It stars Sally Yamashita breaking in a new American astronaut--possibly Jeremy Wainman's predecessor? Teyud za-Zhalt appears, while she's still a freelance gunslinger kicking around that provincial town the US built its base next to. One tiny hint as to her royal origins, which would be wasted on anyone who hasn't read ItCotCK first. Anyway, it does nothing to clarify the mystery of the Lords of Creation; they're not mentioned at all. It's pure set-piece, and exists only to explore the world it's built. So it copies that aspect of ItCotCK without the annoyance of asking questions about the deeper meaning of the story that are never answered. I might hope that now that Stirling's playing in LoC again, he'll write more about it; but even if not, this story was a lot of fun. Check it out if you get the chance. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:37, October 19, 2013 (UTC) :Thanks for the heads up. I'd seen SMS was in that collection, but I didn't put two and two together for whatever reason. TR (talk) 15:38, October 19, 2013 (UTC) Apparently Old Venus finally came out this week, and Stirling did not contribute to this one, so apparently the earlier return to LoC continuity was a one-night-only thing. :( HT didn't contribute either, which came as no surprise as we would almost certainly have known about it well in advance. It's too bad he wasn't involved in this project, I imagine he would have done quite well if he had. A short story set in the same universe as AWoD would have been welcome, and so of course would something brand new. Turtle Fan (talk) 02:41, March 9, 2015 (UTC) Stirling Wiki: What Happened to It? I followed some of the links we have for non-Emberverse works and find myself redirected to that wiki with the article deleted since its not Emberverse. Does anyone know what happened to the S. M. Stirling Wiki? ML4E (talk) 21:39, May 2, 2016 (UTC) < bump > In case you missed this. TR, I believe you had done some work on the more general wiki. Have you heard anything? ML4E (talk) 17:31, May 4, 2016 (UTC) :I noticed the same thing myself. I hope it's just down temporarily, because I really like the Charge of Lee's Brigade. Also, is Emberverse the series that begins with Dies the Fire? I read that book and it was boring as hell. It might have been a serviceable Mad Max genre entry if it had edited out the 300 pages which describe agricultural processes and Wiccan rituals. It was vastly inferior to the Nantucket series, although that one got a little stupid in the end as well. Does the Dies the Fire series improve as it goes on?JonathanMarkoff (talk) 17:55, May 4, 2016 (UTC) ::It would appear that the general Stirling wiki has been deactivated, and reformed as an "Islands in the Sea of Time/Nantucket" wiki. Emberverse did indeed begin with Dies the Fire. Emberverse covers several decades over its dozen volumes. I only read the first trilogy, and I wasn't compelled to read past volume 3. TR (talk) 18:00, May 4, 2016 (UTC) ::Thanks for the info TR. I left a message for the admin and he responded here: User talk:Gaarmyvet. So the general wiki has become the "'I'sland in the 'S'ea 'o'f 'T'ime Wiki" while the "Emberverse Wiki" remains as a separate entity. ISOT was the first trilogy where the island of Nantucket was sent back to 1250 BC. The same phenomena also caused the events in Dies the Fire which was the first book in a trilogy, followed by a tetralogy, another trilogy and now a new tetralogy. (Puff, puff.) I read the first trilogy which was meh and left it until "Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers" came out. I read it in a collection of short stories set in that universe and I sampled some of the other stories. The second book of the the latest tetralogy follows up on "Topanga" which I perused but I decided to go back and skim the first book to get a fuller understanding. Its somewhat better so I may continue the series from there. ML4E (talk) 18:10, May 5, 2016 (UTC) Categories Where are his categories?Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 17:20, November 27, 2019 (UTC) :Don't know, don't care. TR (talk) 17:52, November 27, 2019 (UTC) :Nor I. :By the way, I just noticed I predicted a LoC sequel series--eleven and a half years ago. Oh well. I still think the idea had merit, but clearly the ship has long since sailed. Turtle Fan (talk) 06:52, November 28, 2019 (UTC) :I wasn't particularly interested either. I think this finicky stuff is busy-work but I did check and restored previous categories. ML4E (talk) 21:21, November 28, 2019 (UTC)